'Nature is healing': The politics of enchantment.
| Author | Elliott, Cathy |
| Position | LESSONS FROM THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS |
'This is the goats' town now. It's their time.' Leroy Bennett, Llandudno resident (1) A herd of mountain goats has come down from the Great Orme mountain and taken charge of the seaside town of Llandudno during the national lockdown. Unless you have a front garden, hedge or bay tree in that town that you are particularly fond of, you have probably been enchanted by the sight of these fantastic creatures clip-clopping around as if they owned the place. (2) Meanwhile, we have also heard news of wild boar roaming through the streets of Bergamo, and the more prosaic flourishing of British wildflowers because the spring mowing of roadside verges has been delayed. It is tempting to read these stories as signs that nature is resurging without the damaging influence of human beings, now that we have gone into retreat, or even that the natural world would be better off without our malign influence.
It's not too difficult to see how this logic might lead to the posters--allegedly distributed by Extinction Rebellion (though most probably a hoax)--proclaiming that 'Corona is the cure. Humans are the disease'. (3) Things do not have to get so explicitly dark, though, to betray a curious underlying assumption that humans are something separate from, and destructive to, nature. Any account of social distancing that tells a story of humans in retreat and nature resurgent is operating with the assumption that humans and nature are in some way opposing and antagonistic, if unequal, forces.
This narrative only works in the case of the Llandudno goats if you look at a brief snapshot in time, however. A slightly longer historical perspective reveals a much more intertwined and interdependent story. After all, Kashmiri goats did not arrive on a Welsh mountainside spontaneously. According to local historian Eve Parry, the ancestors of these goats were first imported to France from Northern India, for their wool. A pair was then purchased by a Squire Christopher Tower in Brentford, Essex, in the early nineteenth century. Tower managed to breed a flock and produce a cashmere shawl, a very fashionable item at the time. George IV admired the shawl and gladly accepted the gift of two goats, which soon became the fast-growing Windsor herd. The goats ended up in North Wales when Sir Savage Mostyn obtained a pair from Queen Victoria later that century and took them to the grounds of Gloddaeth Hall. It could be that they escaped onto Great Orme, but it is more likely that...
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